You forgot to quote the "best" bit a few paragraphs later :
>It's important to first explain the horrible template that ruined Trance music. Somehow a musical artform that devoted itself to hypnotic rhythms and spacey soundscapes became, inside of a decade, a mass produced assembly line McProduct for middle class Europeans (pejoratively known as Trancecrackers because they're white. Terribly, tragically, sunblindingly, basic-bitch-ordering-a-pumpkin-spice-latte white) who should have not spent their young adulthood clubbing but rather dying horribly in another continent-engulfing conflict (I mean, come on: Europe is due).
You know, one could answer this with an equally salty comeback, like how ironic it is for an American to think he's in a position to lecture white Europeans in any way about electronic music culture or taste : we built, grew and lived this music revolution for 20 years, while white America was still all about stale rehashes of guitar-based genres*, and black America all about hip-hop. To some extent, they still are.
Then around 2009**, when we had matured this into something commercial enough to be sold to the US public, we exported the cheesiest, bro-ready fringe of it as "EDM" and sure enough, it caught on like wildfire. Frat boys & sorority girls had "never heard anything like this OMG!" :)
But with remarks like the one he makes about war, it's probably sufficient to say that this guy, knowledgeable as he is, sounds like a bit of a bigot and a right d*ck.
*This was the era when Eminem had lines like "nobody listens to techno" (and by "techno" he meant Moby, lol), while in Europe the Berlin Love Parade had a million people in the streets each summer. I was dumbfounded in the late 90s at how many different names the id3 tag format had for country music and Christian genres. It was a complete WTF from a European perspective ! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3#Genre_list_in_ID3v1[12]
** David Guetta-produced "I gotta feeling" for the Black Eyed Peas is widely credited to have launched EDM into the US mainstream. Soon after he & Tiesto had their Vegas residencies, EDC & UMF blew up and the rest is history.
For someone who seems to have been around the scene for quite a while, you come off as woefully uneducated on the history of electronic music.
Electronic music is and has always been an international phenomenon. Innovations happen due to cross-pollination of styles, not because specifically white Europeans "mature" it.
The Techno that blew up in Europe was initially imported from African Americans. Jungle/DNB was born out of mixing UK Hardcore with Jamaican Reggae/Dancehall/Dub music.
Footwork, Club, Bounce, Industrial, House, Electro, to name a few, are all styles that were prevalent on dancefloors in the US during the time you characterize it as "all about stale rehashes of guitar-based genres". All of these styles are woven into the DNA of the new underground generation. Nobody "owns" electronic music, and the scene is so much better when people stop claiming that anyone does.
> For someone who seems to have been around the scene for quite a while, you come off as woefully uneducated on the history of electronic music.
I suppose that's one way of saying you have a different perspective from mine.
>Electronic music is and has always been an international phenomenon. Innovations happen due to cross-pollination of styles, not because specifically white Europeans "mature" it.
>The Techno that blew up in Europe was initially imported from African Americans. Jungle/DNB was born out of mixing UK Hardcore with Jamaican Reggae/Dancehall/Dub music.
A lot of the genres that Ishkur despises are every bit as European homegrown as Motown is African-American to the bones.
> Nobody "owns" electronic music, and the scene is so much better when people stop claiming that anyone does.
Sure, but that's a bit like saying Silicon Valley doesn't own the Internet.
It's technically true but SV is still (or was until very recently) a mecca, ground zero for all things Internet.
There is such a thing for music genres as well, and a good indicator of that is the extent to which that genre has bubbled up into mainstream pop music charts.
I'm happy to acknowledge that there are many subgenres of electronic music, including some of my favorites, which truly were grown and blossomed in Europe.
I took issue with your original comment because of the claim that electronic music is basically an ethnically white, European phenomenon. The SV->Europe comparison would be apt here if Europe were indeed _the_ mecca for all electronic music. This is obviously false unless you ignore huge swaths of the history or massively constrain your definition of what constitutes electronic music.
If you use the charts to measure what's happening at the underground/local level of any place, you're never going to get a good picture. Based on the charts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_number-one_ai...) it would appear that Europeans seldom listened to music written by Europeans in the 90s!
> This was the era when in the US Eminem had lines like "nobody listens to techno"
That was a diss line about Moby, a "techno" artist who achieved mainstream US popularity around that time. Eminem wasn't trying to accurately depict the state of electronic music in the US, he was being salty.
I know, but precisely : referring to Moby as "techno" says everything on how clued up about electronic music the average US listener or artist was at the time :)
Moby may have ended up with chart success and his tracks on car adverts, but he most did produce plenty of music in the same realm as the artists in the article. Maybe a bit more stompy and with a more varied structure than the clinical X-101 stuff, but it would be unfair to not call it techno. Whether or not Eminem was aware of his early work I couldn't say.
By my own memory as a teenager growing up in the rave scene, electronic music was weird and unapproachable to pretty much everyone. Big Beat like The Crystal Method and Prodigy had made some waves, and of course there was Moby, but outside of my raver friends and a brief attempt to get eurodance (like Alice Deejay) on Top 40 radio by the local media conglomerates, "techno" was pretty niche.
I mean, in the early 2000s I saw Paul Oakenfold -- twice -- at small clubs, and it was easy to get into the front. I would write requests in big letters on my phone and see if I could get the DJ to play them. (Tiesto wasn't as approachable but that asshole would crank the speakers up well past their distortion point)
Meanwhile, the US got the shittiest EDM ever in 2010-2011
as something "revolutionary".
You kickstarted the acid house genre, but you let it rot
in the dust in the 90's.
We Europeans had a huge underground fanbase since late 80's,
and since mid-90's trance has been huge for example in
Spain and Germany, up to the point to be broadcasted in
the state-backed first TV channel in the mornings.
North American techno fan for almost 30 years here.
Europe had an _audience_ for techno, yes but also an audience for some of the cheesiest garbage dance music on the planet.
Don't lecture us -- Detroit and Chicago are the heart and soul of techno & house, even if the artists from there weren't always appreciated at home.
Europe has been exporting its garbage trance and progressive crap since the late 80s. Soul driven techno from African-American artists had a way of being exported over to Europe, absorbed by the locals, and shipped back as soulless amphetamine driven crap.
Electronic music in Europe has always been a huge industry, and some amazing music made... but as a % of product produced/consumed.. only a small amount of it was good (which amounted to a lot of excellent records in an absolute ocean of other junk.)
Back in the day there was an amazing amount of quality underground music coming out of Chicago, New York, Detroit / Windsor, and smaller centres in the midwest, too. Great stuff even from here in Toronto. The west coast was an entirely other story, mostly dominated by "funky breaks" and trance and stuff I didn't like.
Also I can't tell from your tone if the YouTube video you posted is made to be made fun of, or enjoyed? Because to me it's clearly the former. The kind of shit that teenage kids at raves back in the 90s would take meth to and grind their teeth and we'd just gag at.
Yes, we had all that crap here back in the mid-90s. Huge raves, mostly crap. EDM is just what the next generation called it, and I guess maybe it had a broader audience.
>Europe had an _audience_ for techno, yes but also an audience for some of the cheesiest garbage dance music on the planet.
That's actually a sign that a genre has taken hold and reached maturity in a location, with subgenres catering for every layer of society.
As a genre ambassador, you know you've won when your sound (even a watered down version of it) has become the sound of pop music chart-toppers. That happened in Europe in the early 90s, in America in the early 2010s.
> Don't lecture us, Detroit and Chicago are the heart and soul of techno, even if the artists from there weren't always appreciated at home.
I don't know, that's a bit like saying that Helsinki is the heart and soul of Linux, and Uppsala that of MySQL, which is technically true but ... this isn't really where it came of age and blossomed.
> Europe has been exporting its garbage trance and progressive crap since the 90s. Soul driven techno from African-American artists had a way of being exported over to Europe, absorbed by the locals, and exported back as soulless amphetamine driven crap.
That's controversial. Techno is often described as the child of African-American soul music on one side, and white European experimental electronic music on the other.
It's trendy to stress the former and downplay the latter, and that's certainly fair enough for house music.
But when it comes to trance, eurodance, etc, I think that owes almost nothing to America or African-American music, and everything to Kraftwerk and Jean-Michel Jarre.
> That happened in Europe in the early 90s, in America in the early 2010s.
Not my recollection, though? "Electronica" was a mainstream record store category and a huge market in the late 90s and early 2000s in North America long before this "EDM" label was applied later.
I think, yes, that it fell out of fashion post 9-11 and so in the 10 year gap the EDM thing happened later. So we're really talking about a generational horizon thing here, where EDM was the re-emergence of the mainstream top-40 "rave" thing 10 years later for the next generation.
But I remember 3 waves of this stuff:
very early 90s, late 80s, crap like C&C music factory, etc. was the mainstreamization of house music. "pump up the volume" KLF "What Time is Love" etc. was chart topping mainstreamization of acid house, hell it got played all the time on the jukebox in my smalltown / rural Canadian high school. I worked an indoor mall amusement park and the early 90s equivalent of today's EDM was on constant rotation. Dance megamixes, etc.
mid-late 90s, "Electronica"; Chemical Brothers, Prodigy, Underworld, etc. were big. And then the tail end of that it just was everywhere.
And then later, this EDM thing.
So 10 year waves, and at no point has it really been foreign to North America. There were huge several thousand person raves all through the late 90s. It's just that in _context_ of hip-hop R&B dominance in North America and its exports, maybe it looks to Europeans as non-existent.
I'm not questioning the experience of North American music lovers and club-goers like yourself, I'm sure you could get your hands on that stuff.
But take a look at the Wikipedia pages for the tracks and artists you mentioned, and see how high they went in the US vs European charts (to be fair, I was surprised that the Prodigy did so well in the US)
My claim is that the degree to which a genre becomes mainstream in a location is a good reflection of this place being "ground zero" for it.
Yeah I'm just saying it was far more mainstream than is intimated. "Charts" have always been a marketing tool, it's questionable to me from the 80s on how much they reflect what people were actually listening to.
The point is that mass consumption of dance music was a huge thing in North America.
I mean it's funny. In the early 90s I went to visit my extended family in Germany. At that point I was already a major techno fan, but the funny thing is that when I went to Europe all my cousins, the music they listened to was mostly American R&B and hip-hop. Watching overdubbed episodes of Family Matters. Huge consumers of a side of North American culture that I did not. So to me the demographic situation is more complicated.
I think many Europeans on this thread might have a biased perception of what music consumption in the 90s in North America looked like based more on North American exports than on what was actually happening here. That and most people here are quite young.
>I think many Europeans on this thread might have a biased perception of what music consumption in the 90s in North America looked like based more on North American exports than on what was actually happening here
Kinda like the American perception on European's techno culture.
Hint: when the clubs released their yearly compilation based on 3 or 4 CD's, you had one disc per genre: Techno, trance, house and progressive/sung. So in the end we listened to all of the EDM offer inbetween depending on the mood.
Also, as I said, dance megamix CD's in Spain could be found as early as late 80's. Ok, more like vinyls, but the concept stays.
I don't have much to add to this apart from to say I think you're both right to varying degrees.
But more importantly I'm enjoying this passionate discourse on HN about a genre of music that I care deeply about.
I think it's fair to say that dance music today wouldn't exist without the breadth of innovation that happened on both sides of "the pond" in recent decades - and to not be too European/US centric - elsewhere around the world too.
Brutal get off my lawn rhetoric over music that is intended to unite! Man who thought this thread would devolve like this. Europe obviously has pushed the envelope and produced fantastic music just as the US has, why the scuffle?
>It's important to first explain the horrible template that ruined Trance music. Somehow a musical artform that devoted itself to hypnotic rhythms and spacey soundscapes became, inside of a decade, a mass produced assembly line McProduct for middle class Europeans (pejoratively known as Trancecrackers because they're white. Terribly, tragically, sunblindingly, basic-bitch-ordering-a-pumpkin-spice-latte white) who should have not spent their young adulthood clubbing but rather dying horribly in another continent-engulfing conflict (I mean, come on: Europe is due).
You know, one could answer this with an equally salty comeback, like how ironic it is for an American to think he's in a position to lecture white Europeans in any way about electronic music culture or taste : we built, grew and lived this music revolution for 20 years, while white America was still all about stale rehashes of guitar-based genres*, and black America all about hip-hop. To some extent, they still are.
Then around 2009**, when we had matured this into something commercial enough to be sold to the US public, we exported the cheesiest, bro-ready fringe of it as "EDM" and sure enough, it caught on like wildfire. Frat boys & sorority girls had "never heard anything like this OMG!" :)
But with remarks like the one he makes about war, it's probably sufficient to say that this guy, knowledgeable as he is, sounds like a bit of a bigot and a right d*ck.
*This was the era when Eminem had lines like "nobody listens to techno" (and by "techno" he meant Moby, lol), while in Europe the Berlin Love Parade had a million people in the streets each summer. I was dumbfounded in the late 90s at how many different names the id3 tag format had for country music and Christian genres. It was a complete WTF from a European perspective ! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ID3#Genre_list_in_ID3v1[12]
** David Guetta-produced "I gotta feeling" for the Black Eyed Peas is widely credited to have launched EDM into the US mainstream. Soon after he & Tiesto had their Vegas residencies, EDC & UMF blew up and the rest is history.